No one saw Elena at the station: Shopkeeper, staff

No one saw Elena at the station: Shopkeeper, staff
Preetu Nair, TNN

PANAJI: In a further twist to the death of Russian teenager Elena Sukhanova, staff at the Thivim railway station have told TOI that they did not
see the girl at the station on the night her body was found on the tracks.

They insist that it would have been impossible for them to miss her as the collapsible gate to enter the platform at the station doesn't open till 4 am, one hour before the arrival of the Mangala Express.

It may be recalled that on May 8, Elena's body was found on the tracks about 3.5 km from the station. Police had said that from available evidence it appeared that Elena might have travelled either on the Mangala Express which left Thivim station at 5.02am or the Netravati Express which left the station at 7.09am and "somehow fallen from the train while she was travelling".

When TOI visited the station at about 3am on Friday, the collapsible gate to the platform was locked and passengers (mostly migrant labourers) were found to be fast asleep on the floor at

the entrance. At 4am, the gate was opened as the ticket counter had started issuing tickets for the Mangala Express. By 4.30am, the two shops in the station too opened for business.

"We don't open the collapsible gate at the station till 4am. Even if Elena was at the station, she would have had to wait outside and would have been noticed entering the platform once the gate was opened. Generally, whenever a lone tourist is brought to the station in a taxi in the night, the driver knocks at the gate and we allow the passenger to enter. But nothing of that sort happened on the night of May 8," a Thivim railway staffer told TOI. Elena's body was discovered at 7.45am. A shopkeeper at the station added, "No one saw her (Elena) here. It's surprising that all of us could have missed a lone, drunk foreign tourist."

Elena's Russian friends incidentally, had earlier told police that the teenagers had consumed beer on the night she died. "At about 2am (on May 8) myself, Natalia, Galina Evegeny, Georgy and Elena left Mambo's and went to the Baga beach. We all again consumed beer on the Baga beach sands. At about 2.30am myself, Natalia, Galina, Evegeny and Georgy decided to leave and go back to our hotel. However, Elena decided to stay back on the beach and continued having beer. She was in a drunken state," Russian tourist Andrey Dorin had said in her statement to the Mapusa police. She added that she was introduced to Elena a day before the latter's death during dinner at a beach shack and restaurant in Baga.

Meanwhile, Calangute police sources told TOI that the Traveller's Inn, a guest house where Elena was staying before her death, and the Baga-based Buckingham shack, whose owner she reportedly called her "boyfriend", "closed down a few days after the Russian girl's death". "Generally, the shack is open till the last week of May and the guest house is shut sometime in mid-June," said police sources. Shack owner Vishant Kundaikar told TOI, "It was a lean season and there were no customers. So I closed down the shack."

When contacted, senior police officials refused to comment saying investigations were on. Russian consul general Alexander Mantytsky is in Goa and is expected to meet the chief minister on Tuesday.

2 June,2009, The Times of India, Goa edition